But hotter during the day. I took off about 11:30 for to roam around a while before my German lessons. B told me to wait one more stop on the subway before exiting, then walk west and I'd run into this:
An aerial view of the Schmelz
This is a fascinating collection of over 600 private gardens right in the middle of urban Vienna. There's a good explanation and photo essay here, which I urge you to take a look at.
Lately I've become fascinated by the concept of small homes. I think every urban center---or even mid-sized city----ought to have zoning which allows small homes on small plots of land---say 100 X 50 feet or so, with houses of about 100 - 500 square foot size. So if the average price of an average house is, say, $200 per SF, you could build a decent 100SF house for $20,000. Who the hell needs huge homes and huge mortgages? The answer: almost nobody.
This experiment in Vienna, which began in the 1920's, proves it can be done.
I roamed around awhile and came upon this rooftop structure:
Click to enlarge, and take a look at the yellow structure at the top of the building.
Wouldn't this make a cool tiny house, even free-standing on the ground, or on stilts?
Last week I ate here. I came upon the same place today, so took this shot.
I enjoyed sitting on the shady side of the street watching the world go by.
Roamed around quite a while then went back to a pizza joint I discovered last week for lunch. Two slices and a beer. Wrote a postcard to my former co-workers back home, then walked a block to the park for my German lesson.
My Serbian buddy Dragan was there again, as was the Egyptian woman, three Hungarians, and the dude from Gambia. During our break, Dragan asked me a bunch of questions about English, and I asked him several questions about Serbian.
The Serbian language doesn't have articles---like "the." Where we say "I went to the store" or "I kicked him in the nuts" they say (I guess) "I went to store" or "I kicked him in nuts." He also told me you can tell the gender of a Serbian word by the last letter in the word. (We also don't have genders in English, but lots of other languages do.) And, Serbian has 30 letters in its alphabet, each with its own unique sound---unlike English, where some sounds duplicate like the hard C and K, or the soft G and J, or the soft C and S.
One of the German teachers asked me what "Inception" means, since that's the big movie right now. "Beginning," I told him. "Auf Deutsch, anfang."
Today I learned different ways of saying "when." In English we might say "in the morning" or "in Summer" or "on Wednesday" but in German you use a different word depending on if you're talking about a time of day, a day of the week, or a time of the year.
Well, shit.
Tomorrow is my next lesson and I want to suggest to Dragan that we get together when we can during my stay, after the course ends this Thursday, so we can keep in practice with each other. He seems like a good dude. I enjoyed my quick lesson in the Serbian language during our break.
After class let out at 5, I wandered around for a while instead of going straight home. Browsed through a military surplus store and then walked my damned legs off for about an hour, looking for a place where I might want to sit down and have dinner. But nothing quite struck me as perfect---the food was wrong or the there was no outdoor tables, or the street was too busy, or whatever. Finally I found a streetcar stop that would take me home, so I trudged the final half kilometer or so to our house.
I offered to take B to dinner, but she made dinner instead----fish, vegetables, and mashed potatoes. A nice bottle of white wine, which we're still working on as I write this at 10:30 PM. We might have to crack another one open....
